Key to success

Muhammad Farmer, Director, BITE, and S. Ramachandran, Vice-Chancellor, University of Madras, exchanging an MoU.-M. VEDHAN

Coaching institutes in Chennai help students achieve goals.

NOW what? is the question that bothers most Plus Two students and graduates who are not sure about which course or career to pursue. The answer lies in knowing what is available, said Ram R.V., director of Smart Training Resources. A success story involves two aspects: one, the goal you choose and, the other, the path that you take to reach the goal.

Smart Training Resources, which has centres in Chennai and Bangalore, conducts coaching classes for the entrance tests to top law universities in India, the Indian Institutes of Technology (for humanities and social sciences entrance examinations), the National Institutes of Fashion Technology, the National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad), and for visual communication courses in prestigious colleges.

It also offers coaching for Common Admission Test (CAT), XLRI Aptitude Test (XAT), Management Aptitude Test (MAT), Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), Tamil Nadu Common Entrance Test (TANCET) and Postgraduate Common Entrance Test.

Smart Training Resources specialises in placement training. Apart from in-house training programmes in Chennai and Bangalore, it conducts placement training programmes in reputed colleges across India. A recent addition to its domain is postal coaching.

Lyceum, named after Aristotles academy, is a coaching centre for students aspiring to go to the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries. It prepares them for Graduate Record Examination (GRE), GMAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test 1 (SAT), Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS).

Lyceum boasts of experienced faculty and high-quality course material. Triumphant Institute of Management Education Private Limited (TIME), started in Hyderabad in 1992, coaches students for CAT.

Jaideep Choudhary, senior member of the academic team, calls this programme our flagship product. It also trains students for IIT-JEE, AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination) and tests conducted by various State governments for admission to engineering and medical courses.

It offers online tests for students seeking admission to the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani. About a hundred students coached by TIME joined IITs in the current academic year (2007-08), according to Choudhary. Classes are also conducted for GRE, GMAT, TOEFL and IELTS.

Brilliant Tutorials in Chennai provides both postal and classroom coaching for engineering, medicine, banking, management and civil service examinations. Contact programmes are held in 15 towns in India and model tests conducted at 30 centres across the country. The hallmark of Brilliant is its IIT-JEE coaching programme where students are coached from standard IX onwards. Its coaching for civil services examination is also well known. Prohibitive costs deter most students who aspire to study abroad.

This is where Singapore commands an advantage, said Sheila Devi Raju, country manager (India) of Management Development Institute, Singapore (MIDS). Not only are tuition fees more affordable there, the cost of living is low because of the efficient public housing and transport system available.

Founded in 1956, MIDS collaborates with universities in the U.K., the U.S., France and Australia for courses in travel, tourism and hospitality, life sciences, information technology, mass communication, business management, banking and finance, and masters in international business. The institute has about 10,000 students from 52 countries, and more than 200 of them are from India. Said Balaji Gopalakrishnan at the MIDS India Representative Office: Most of the Indian students are from New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. We also get students from Kolkata, Bhopal, [and from States such as] Bihar, Haryana and Kerala.

MIDS offers M.A. in mass communications from Oklahoma City University, Masters in international business from Grenoble Graduate School of Business (France) and MBA from Edith Cowan University, Australia. The MBA from Bradford (the U.K.) is popular because it is one of the few European business schools to have gained the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) accreditation.

Several universities and colleges in Tamil Nadu such as Anna University, the University of Madras and Vellore Institute of Technology University have signed memoranda of understanding (MoU) with foreign universities for exchange of students and faculty and for joint research. What is catching up is twinning programmes, whereby a student can study a part of his course in Tamil Nadu and the rest in a university abroad.

On July 16, Madras University Vice-Chancellor S. Ramachandran and principal and director of the British Institute of Technology and E-Commerce (BITE) Muhammad Farmer signed an MoU for specialised, one-year postgraduate courses in biotechnology, nanotechnology, biometrics, business law and travel and tourism. Today, we are not able to provide masters degrees equivalent to those courses in other countries. Hence, we have tied up with BITE. We are slowly acquiring the capability to offer these courses for students from India and abroad, Ramachandran said.

According to D. Viswanathan, Vice-Chancellor, Anna University, the university has signed MoUs with 50 foreign universities in the past two years for exchange of faculty, students, research scholars, joint research programmes and mutual funding.

For instance, the Government of Netherlands, through its universities, is providing Rs. 2 crore to the Water Resources Department of Anna University for research and fellowship for researchers. Universities in Australia are looking forward to receiving support from Anna University for organising twinning programmes for postgraduate courses.